Dark Wind: A True Account of Hurricane Gloria's Assault on Fire Island ANNOTATION
Hurricane Gloria is headed for the United States, destined to land at Fire Island, New York, a narrow sandbar south of Long Island. 10 people refuse to evacuate and stay behind to care for the island's unique ecological environment. Jiler combines interviews with the natural history of the island to produce a panoramic account of nature in its inexplicable, sublime fury.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
September 25, 1985. The worst storm in half a century is headed toward the United States, her point of landfall - Fire Island, a thirty-mile-long sandbar hugging the shore of Long Island. As Hurricane Gloria approached, the East Coast was evacuated for hundreds of miles north and south. But on Fire Island itself, ten people refused to leave. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, John Jiler tells the story of those people. A gay man with AIDS stayed because he had nothing left to lose, and at the height of the storm stood on a dune and watched, unafraid. One pair of friends tried to endure the storm with deep, meditative prayer; another trio, with a wild, chattering cocktail party. Also on the island lay the Sunken Forest, an ancient woods teeming with birds, plant, and animal life that was no less profoundly threatened by the power of Gloria. In this literary tour de force, Jiler combines the results of in-depth interviews with the survivors with detailed knowledge of the unique social and natural history of Fire Island to produce a panoramic account of nature in its inexplicable, sublime fury.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This unusual account of a storm offers a strange amalgam of the sublime and the silly, the significant and the trivial. In his first book, journalist/dramatist Jiler gives a virtually blow-by-blow account of events that transpired on September 25-26, 1985, when Hurricane Gloria, the worst in half a century, hit the narrow, elongated tract of land off Long Island's southern coast known as Fire Island. The author provides a splendid capsule history of Fire Island, including its development into a summer home for New York City's affluent homosexuals. His profiles of the 10 people, straight and gay, who refused to flee from Gloria to the mainland are also interesting, and he vividly depicts the storm's terrifying, capricious power. Less appealing is the author's tendency to anthropomorphize animals and birds, frequently to laughable extent. Nonetheless, anyone interested in Fire Island will enjoy his lively narrative. Photos not seen by PW . (July)
Library Journal
This is an engaging story that reads like a novel, though it is nonfiction. On September 25, 1985, Hurricane Gloria hit landfall on Fire Island, a summer resort off the shore of Long Island, N.Y. While much of the East Coast was evacuated, several island residents, for various reasons, decided to stick it out. Journalist Jiler recounts what happened, but his book is more about the cultural history of Fire Island and its gay population than about its natural history (although the publisher has the book labeled as such). While he mentions the island's birds, trees, and deer, there are some inaccuracies (the Coriolis effect is not an old wives' tale; many birds do have keen hearing). Occasional coarse terms and descriptions are needlessly included but are not overly distracting. Acceptable for a social science collection, a gay collection, a Fire Island collection, but not for a natural history collection. Photos not seen. For another account of a hurricane's destructive impact, see William Price Fox's Luna tic Wind , LJ 9/1/92.--Ed.-- Nancy Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio
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